[Building Sakai] New Tool: Attendance

Fri Feb 11 00:31:21 PST 2011

Hi all,
This tool is also my concern. I partially agree with Mathew. It's of benefit
to students.
However, in our university, Sakai is used for distance education as well,
thus, there is a need to keep track of students about how many times they
log in Sakai, download exercises,... IP address logging/filter might be
useful in this case. Furthermore, Sakai is used in our university as the
main e-learning system. Therefore, it would be great to have these features
in a Sakai's tool.

That is our case. Let's have your ideas.

Best regards,

Message: 9
> Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:04:05 -0500
> From: Matthew Jones <jonespm at umich.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] New Tool: Attendance
> To: csev <csev at umich.edu>
> Cc: Sakai-Dev Dev <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <AANLkTinexqfJJOnY2nDf9veE4zOSvK1_OB9r6ss3eQgt at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
> Attendance seems like a tough subject. I never had a college class that
> required attendance though I had some friends that did. Taking attendance
> for adults on something they're paying for seemed silly to me. If students
> don't attend class they'll probably do poorly on the exams, so go to the
> classes. It's of benefit to students, right?
>
> The best way for an instructor to *take* attendance was to have random or
> frequent pop quizzes. (even if they were trivially easy) While I say I
> never
> had a professor that took attendance, I did have a few that did this. :/
>
> On the subject of this system, IP address logging/filter doesn't seem that
> useful because it can be tricky to get all the correct address ranges at
> some campuses (it was for me to try to setup a firewall) and with VPN and
> proxy servers you have to figure out what to do with those.
> Students/staff/faculty can even often setup their own proxy servers. There
> would probably be more ways to cheat it if someone *really* wanted to.
>
> I think the idea of an instructor giving students a code they enter would
> be
> easier. At the start of class instructor signs in, gets a code. Says "Class
> please sign in with the attendance tool with this 4 letter/digit code".
> Sure
> that could be communicated via twitter/chat or something with someone
> sitting outside class, but this would be at least as good as a student says
> "Here" when called on for another student.
>
> While I'm not sold on the requirement of attendance as a contributor to the
> grade, an attendance system could be useful if you see a student is getting
> a poor grade and you can also see that they have poor attendance. It could
> also be used by other researchers at a university look for other problems
> such as how weather might affect attendance (could instructors/students get
> in with the snowstorm) or if there is some flu outbreak.
>
> As far as implementation, I also agree that this sounds like something that
> should be setup externally and work through BasicLTI. A service like this
> would be useful outside of Sakai.
>
> -Matthew
>
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 11:40 AM, csev <csev at umich.edu> wrote:
> >
> > - Have IP address logging and an IP address filter
> > - Have an optional secret that would be communicated to the class to
> unlock
> > it for students
> > - Integration into the Gradebook based on instructor controlled settings.
> >
> > It should take be a few days on Google App Engine and then it would work
> in
> > Moodle, ATutor, etc as well as Blackboard since it is Basic LTI :)
> >
> > Of course it is a bit of an experiment so I am not suggesting that you
> > change direction in any way - but as I build it, I will add commentary to
> > your confluence page.
> >
> > /Chuck
> >
> > On Feb 8, 2011, at 4:44 PM, Bryan Holladay wrote:
> >
> > Everyone,
> >
> > We are putting together some specifications and designs for a new tool
> that
> > will track student's attendance, partially sponsored by some of
> Longsight's
> > clients. The idea is to have a simple table that lists each day the class
> > meets where a teacher can insert in attendance records for each student
> (see
> > below (or attachment) for a crude mockup).  I've heard there's been some
> > interest in the community for a tool like this and it would be great to
> get
> > the community involved. I'm hoping to get input from everyone about any
> > ideas or features they'd like to see. Also, any collaboration with
> design,
> > UI, coding, or internationalization would help a lot. I've set up a wiki
> > page where anyone can contribute input/ideas or sign up to help:
> > https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/ATTEND/Home
> >
> > Here are some quick ideas for specifications:
> >  ? Show a listing of dates (similar to a calendar, but in
> > a spreadsheet-like format, rather than a monthly calendar-style view, and
> > with the students names listed in one column on the left)
> >  ? Have the ability to select only certain days of the week for viewing
> as
> > the default for a particular site (for example, Mondays and Wednesdays
> only,
> > if it is a M-W class)
> >  ? Enter an attendance mark for each student for each date the class
> > meets, such as P (present), A (absent), T (tardy), E (excused), H
> (holiday),
> > etc.
> >  ? Listing would be sortable by name, or specific date column
> >  ? Students displayed could be filtered by group or section
> >  ? Allow faculty to export and/or print the attendance data for
> > offline-line record keeping if needed
> >  ? Allow students to access the tool and view ONLY their own attendance
> > data for that class
> >
> > Additionally, it would be really great if:
> >  ? Faculty had a place where they could define the start and end dates of
> > class for that term
> >  ? There were a way to tabulate the number of absences per user and
> record
> > it somewhere easily visible to faculty and students
> >  ? The instructor could choose to assign points for attendance, and this
> > data could be (optionally) linked to the gradebook to give an overall
> > attendance score
> >
> >
> > Even if you are unable to contribute, it would be nice to know the
> interest
> > level within the community for this tool, so please reply with your
> thoughts
> > or add comments to the confluence page.
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Bryan Holladay
> > The Longsight Group LLC
> >
> > <Screen shot 2011-02-02 at 3.00.04 PM2.png>
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